Google Launches New Recipe Search Engine

Sure we may have stacks of cookbooks on our shelves, and under our desks and on top of our refrigerators, but many if not most of us these days use Google to do a recipe search more often than we unstack our cookbooks. Today, that all gets a lot more fun, or at least (fun is a relative term) a lot more user-friendly.

Google has just launched a recipe search engine that not only filters out the non-recipe content, but sorts the recipes based on targeted ingredients, cooking time and calories. These new features show up on the left-hand side of your Google page, underneath the tags for Everything, Images, Videos, News and Shopping. So search apple pie, and you will be given the option to further refine your search (with or without shortening; less than 60 minutes; less than 500 calories). How cool is that.

For how this search works exactly, read this Wired piece, which contains lots of things far more obscure than the age-old question of butter-or-shortening in your pastry crust. Got a question about leaf lard? We can probably answer that. Not so much issues of semantic webs, microformats, and structured metadata. Anyway, your apple pie search just got a whole lot smarter, even if we didn't.